Friday, September 7, 2012

In the wake of the Republican convention, very few polls have been released. This appears to be due to the close proximity of the Democratic convention; pollsters may be reluctant to poll until after both conventions are over, rather than conducting polls that could be obsoleted by a Democratic convention bounce. However, the polls that have been taken have suggested Mitt Romney got a small bounce from his convention. Please see the Polls page for a list of all recent national polls.

Only three pollsters have polled since the Republican convention: Rasmussen and Gallup, which do daily tracking polls, and CNN/Opinion Research. In judging whether a bounce has been achieved, it might be tempted to simply take one poll immediately before the convention and compare it to a poll afterward. But this runs into the standard problem of polls having a margin of error. Averaging polls is always necessary for accuracy. The following are polls taken after the convention:

With the adjustment made for Gallup using registered voters instead of likely voters, the average is a Romney lead of 0.3 points. Now we will look at polls taken just prior to the convention, from the same pollsters.

The average before the convention was an Obama advantage of 0.3 points. Comparing the two, Romney's bounce was 0.6 points--a very small bounce. Though it's better than nothing, the Romney campaign should be disappointed by seeing so little movement in the polls, even though part of the Rasmussen and Gallup polls were taken during the Democratic convention.

Still, the best polling will be taken out of the shadow of both conventions, during the week of September 17th, when both bounces will have subsided and the standing of both candidates will be more clear.

August continued the lazy summer trend of inactivity in the presidential race until about midway through, when Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan for vice president on August 11th. The choice inspired a mix of reactions from seasoned political observers; Ryan carried serious baggage in the form of his unpopular "Ryan Plan", while not having a natural constituency that he would bring with him, as other "risky" picks would have.

But in the wake of the Ryan selection, Barack Obama's campaign utterly failed to inflict damage upon the Republican ticket. Instead, the Romney/Ryan campaign launched a preemptive counter-attack on Medicare, accusing Obamacare of raiding hundreds of billions of dollars from the program.

Heading toward the convention at the end of the month, the Republican ticket appeared to be energized. However, the national election polls showed that the race continued to be a dead-heat, essentially unchanged all summer.

The Republican National Convention was held in the final week of August. By all accounts, the convention appeared to be a success. It's unlikely Romney could have delivered a better speech than the one he gave, and there were no mishaps. Nevertheless, the true test of a convention's success is whether and to what degree a candidate receives a bounce in the polls. With no post-convention polling available until next week, the outcome is an open question.